Good discussion on last week's ATP about Mastodon, apps, ActivityPub, moderation, and many more potential issues as everyone figures out what to do post-Twitter.
2022-11-28
Trying the latest Gluon iOS beta with pinned profiles.
2022-11-28
Drove by the new Tesla factory in Austin yesterday while coming back from Thanksgiving... The building is absolutely massive. I guess Elon thinks if he can grow a company to this kind of infrastructure, how hard could Twitter servers be?
2022-11-28
Thinking about the simple truth in this phrase from @brentsimmons: "the web heals as Twitter gets sicker"
2022-11-28
If you're not following the full M.b changes feed, you may not notice the tweaks we're rolling out nearly daily. One improvement I wanted to highlight: Micro.blog now notices when someone on Mastodon moves their account to a new instance, so you'll still see their new posts.
2022-11-29
This interview with Will Smith on The Daily Show was really good. It goes just deep enough to be meaningful but still entertaining. Makes me think about not just what he did on Oscar night but also more broadly how we react to mistakes from stars or politicians. Who we forgive.
2022-11-29
Soccer is not my thing but everyone else's excitement is contagious… Watching the last few minutes of United States / Iran. ⚽️
2022-11-29
Great to see all the posts from folks participating in Microblogvember. I've added a new pin for the challenge. It should be redeemed on your Micro.blog account within the next couple days if you used at least 2/3 of the words this month.
Following Mastodon accounts from Micro.blog almost feels like I've re-joined Twitter. It's great to see posts from people I haven't kept up with in years. The main downside: too many hashtags! Maybe I built Micro.blog just to escape from hashtag overuse and now they're back. 😉
2022-11-30
Micro.blog has a mini Goodreads-like feature built in. Why not! I love books and this helps me blog about what I'm reading. The bookshelves account page is one of my favorite things.
Reading the Twitter 2.0 blog post again, I don't think it says enough to actually be a vision for the company. Some bits sound okay ("freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach") and some seem actively misleading ("none of our policies have changed", just our enforcement).
2022-11-30
Finished reading: The Lost Metal by Brandon Sanderson. Mistborn era 2 is a wrap. Really want to reread The Emperor’s Soul now. And not long until the secret project books. 📚
2022-12-01
Tripped over myself this morning when deploying a tiny change, breaking a few endpoints in Micro.blog temporarily. Sorry! Uptime has actually been really good this week. I think we've solved most of our performance problems with the new load.
2022-12-01
John Gruber writing in his link to ooh.directory:
Mastodon is — deservedly! — getting a lot of attention as people re-evaluate their use of Twitter. But what I’m digging more in our current moment is renewed enthusiasm for blogging, and, on the consumption side, RSS feed reading.
I've been planning for this moment for years and the new activity around blogging might even be more than I had hoped for. Great to see.
2022-12-01
Moving from Mastodon to a new instance or to Micro.blog
Mastodon has a feature to move accounts from one instance to another instance. I spent some time recently exploring how this works so that we could support it in Micro.blog. I used this to consolidate my ActivityPub presence from multiple Mastodon accounts to just @manton@manton.org, powered by my blog and Micro.blog.
From what I can tell, this feature is not well-documented. It does not exist in the ActivityPub spec. The "Move" activity examples in the companion ActivityStreams spec also do not cover moving accounts. So I'll document some of the technical bits here in the hope that it'll be helpful to other folks.
To move accounts, 2 things are required:
- From the new instance, set up an "alias" that links your new and old accounts.
- From the old instance, initiate a migration to the new instance.
The Mastodon documentation says that aliases should be set up on both sides of the migration, but this does not seem to be required. In my testing, an alias is only needed on the new instance.
Because I wanted to move to Micro.blog, I added an alias in Micro.blog that references one of my old accounts: @manton@mastodon.social. You can find this in Micro.blog under Account → View Mastodon Details → Aliases.
Aliases are added to the ActivityPub profile information in the field alsoKnownAs. Here's a snippet of my info:
{
"preferredUsername": "manton",
"name": "Manton Reece",
"alsoKnownAs": [
"https://mastodon.social/users/manton"
],
…
} For debugging, I often use curl on the command line to poke around at people's accounts. To see my full ActivityPub JSON, use something like this with the "actor" URL returned from WebFinger:
curl -L -H "Accept: application/activity+json" https://manton.org/activitypub/manton The next step is to sign into the old Mastodon instance and tell it to move to Micro.blog. Mastodon will take a few actions when this starts:
- It will verify that there's an alias on Micro.blog, confirming that both accounts are yours.
- It will lock your Mastodon account, updating the profile to tell people about the new Mastodon instance. (In my case, actually powered by Micro.blog.)
- It will send a "Move" activity to all the instances for all your followers, telling them to update their references to point to your new username.
The "Move" activity is sent to each follower's inbox just like other activities such as "Create". It includes a field target for the new instance that the user is moving to:
{
"actor": "https://mastodon.social/users/manton",
"target": "https://manton.org/activitypub/manton",
…
} Mastodon won't add alsoKnownAs to your ActivityPub profile on the old instance, but instead it will add a similar field named movedTo with the new actor URL:
{
"preferredUsername": "manton",
"name": "Manton Reece",
"movedTo": "https://manton.org/activitypub/manton",
…
} Updating your followers can take quite a while. Likely hours and possibly over a day, if you have hundreds or thousands of followers. It makes sense that this is a very low priority background task. You can watch the progress as Mastodon essentially decrements your follower count on the old instance.
Here's what Mastodon now looks like for my account, to tell people that I've moved:
This is a fairly new feature in Mastodon, and I expect we'll need to keep refining our support for it as there is more real-world usage. If you're using Micro.blog, also remember that Micro.blog is not Mastodon. You can follow and reply to anyone on Mastodon, but you can't use Mastodon-only clients like the upcoming Ivory from Tapbots.
What about moving in the opposite direction, away from Micro.blog to Mastodon? We'll be adding that later. ActivityPub is only currently enabled for new Micro.blog users, or if you've manually enabled it, so I want to wait until we've enabled it for all users. Otherwise there will be no way to move Micro.blog-only followers.
2022-12-02
The 25 Days of omg.lol calendar is so nicely done. Today's feature is feeds, both RSS and JSON Feed. Reminds me a little of our old 12 days of microblogging series, which we've been thinking about updating.
2022-12-02
AI is getting too good.
2022-12-02
On the latest Core Int, @danielpunkass and I talk about the App Store settlement and then follow up again about Twitter, Micro.blog, and Mastodon. Also: not being allowed to pump your own gas.
2022-12-02
For replies, Mastodon only links the username (e.g. just @manton), even for users on other servers. Micro.blog always links the full username with the instance name too (e.g. @manton@manton.org). A bit conflicted. Concise but problematic for common names, or verbose but correct?
2022-12-03
The more I watch Home Alone — especially Home Alone 2 — the more I just feel bad for the thieves. Kevin is torturing them. The kid is twisted and needs help. 🎄
2022-12-04
Set aside some time this morning to improve compatibility between Micro.blog's bookshelves and Bookwyrm, but Bookwyrm federation seems flaky. Couldn't follow other Mastodon accounts either from within bookwyrm.social. Took notes and will revisit later.
2022-12-04
